BLOG Post:  Increase SharePoint Performance and Reduce Storage Costs with EMC & Metalogix

By Trevor Hellebuyck, co-Chief Technology Officer, Metalogix

By now, you probably are aware that StoragePoint v4.0 has been released this week.  With the release of StoragePoint v4.0, we are excited for new features that will greatly improve your SharePoint backup and restore experience.  Not only does StoragePoint v4.0 improve SharePoint performance and reduce storage costs, we can now automatically backup BLOBs allowing our customers to satisfy requirements for Recover Point Objectives that were previously difficult to meet.

In addition to continuous BLOB backup, the latest version of StoragePoint provides granular, item-level restore capability that works with standard out-of-the-box tools.  Here’s how continuous BLOB backup and the granular restore capability can greatly improve your backup/restore experience with SharePoint.

SharePoint Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) providers like Metalogix StoragePoint allow you to externalize unstructured data normally stored within SharePoint content databases to cost effective, EMC storage locations.  This results in up to 95% reduction in your content database size, increases performance of your SharePoint server farm, and now significantly improves backup and restore performance.

EMC tested a cost-effective SharePoint content storage solution that uses a multitier storage architecture enabled by Replication Manager for protection and recovery. The solution used StoragePoint, to catalog the data into SharePoint and used StoragePoint to move and manage BLOBs outside of SQL Server. The solution also used StoragePoint to enable remote BLOB storage for SharePoint 2010 data on VNX unified storage with block (file systems and databases) and file (BLOB) access. StoragePoint File Share Librarian is used to catalog file share data into SharePoint.  EMC Replication Manager provided application consistent protection and recovery for the entire SharePoint farm.

This EMC solution demonstrated that the StoragePoint integration was a highly efficient method for moving file share content into SharePoint and for externalizing unstructured SharePoint content to BLOB storage. The solution was able to prove that you can:

• Use StoragePoint to improve the organization’s overall storage efficiency while meeting SLAs.
• Use StoragePoint File Share Librarian to catalogue files into SharePoint non-disruptively without the need to migrate the file themselves.
• Use StoragePoint to effectively externalize SharePoint BLOBs from the Microsoft SQL content databases.
• Migrate data into SharePoint using EMC Storage and StoragePoint.
• Improve SharePoint farm performance by using EMC FAST Cache and Flash with EMC Storage.
• Protect a SharePoint farm and the farm’s BLOB stores by using Replication Manager to back up and restore content.

SharePoint undoubtedly has become a mission critical platform for many organizations that now rely on its robust Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities.  Due to the critical nature of SharePoint organizations with growing environments now require very low Recover Point Objectives (RPO).

Traditional backup and restore tools often fail to meet the aggressive RPO requirements that organizations demand.  This is in part due to the speed at which these tools can execute backups often taking eight or more hours to backup 1TB of data.  The result is a backup approach that will not meet RPO requirements.

As files are uploaded to SharePoint, StoragePoint externalizes BLOBs in real-time allowing metadata to continue to be stored in the SharePoint content database.   By enabling StoragePoint continuous BLOB backup, a copy of each externalized BLOB will be written to a backup location.  Since the majority of your content database is comprised of unstructured data (i.e. BLOBs), proactively backing up BLOBs leaves very little data to backup on a regular interval using out-of-the-box backup tools.

The combination of continuous BLOB backup and granular restore capability along with the benefits StoragePoint Remote Blob Storage (RBS) makes for a solid platform for scaling your SharePoint environment.

For more information about Metalogix StoragePoint, visit the product page or request a demonstration.